Draw
by TolkienGirl
Summary: Two weeks after they land in Wakanda, Steve starts sketching again. Everyone thinks it's because he's doing better. It's not. (Set in Wakanda, directly post-Civil War. Steve angst, Artist!Steve, with appearances from ensemble. Gen, no slash at all.)
_**draw**_ _(v.)_

 _produce an image of (someone or something) by making lines and marks._

 _ **draw**_ _(v.)_

 _pull, drag, or move_

 _ **draw**_ _(n.)_

 _a game that ends with a stalemate_

...

Two weeks after they land in Wakanda, Steve starts sketching again.

Everyone thinks it's because he's doing better.

It's not.

...

Bucky looks peaceful, when Steve can bring himself to look at him at all.

He wonders if this is how every quest of Captain America ends, more unfinished than when it began.

Being right doesn't mean you can't do wrong.

...

He has a duty, he feels, to spend time in the room with Bucky each day. The great windows look towards the falls, and the sound of the water fills his ears and his throat. It helps block out the voices in his head, at least.

Not Wanda's. He sees her with her knees drawn up to her chin, staring out into the valley. She barely sees him.

Steve imagines she does not want to.

...

T'Challa's library is vast, and the rest wander through it to while away the hours. Surprisingly, Sam spends the most time there. Trying to learn another language, apparently, though the mélange of different books spread out across the long center table shows that he hasn't yet decided on which one.

Steve finds thick cream-colored paper stacked on one of the desks, and thinks of his old notebook, of the circus monkey and Peggy and—he draws his hand back from the paper as though he has been burned.

"It's yours, if you want it," T'Challa says, coming up noiselessly beside him. Ever a gracious host. "Natasha tells me you are an artist."

Steve forces a smile, forces a thank you. He's given up wondering how Natasha knows things, but he wonders this time why she told T'Challa, why she thought it was important.

...

There are oil paints, water colors, and more beside the paper when next he comes. He takes up a few pencils and a few sheets and goes to sit by Bucky. It's easier to stay in that too-silent room when there's something to busy his eyes and hands.

Steve draws lines, parallel lines, no clever pictures, no soft smudges. The lines strike harshly, too simple to be any kind of art. Closer and closer and closer, but they never meet.

He crumples up his attempts at nothing and throws them away.

...

Steve takes up charcoal. It shades the twilight mists of this strange country, and drawing landscapes is easier than thinking about what it _could_ draw—the shadows under Bucky's eyes, the lines of Peggy's face as he had last seen it, how tired she had looked.

His heart is always heavy, but it aches almost more than he can bear when he thinks of Peggy.

She is gone. Bucky is gone.

Captain America is gone, and there is no one left who knew Steve Rogers.

...

Oils are bright enough to paint Natasha, her hair aflame. She finds the picture (of course), and holds it up to him, with a teasing smile on her lips and something else in her eyes.

"Falling in love with me, Rogers?" she demands. They've all grown so quiet lately, so tired. So few teasing jibes and quick retorts.

Tony was the one for that, Steve remembers.

"Just trying to find the light," Steve says. He's not even embarrassed.

Nat asks if she can keep it, and he doesn't see why not.

He watches her whisper something to T'Challa, something he knows must be _he's doing better_ , and he doesn't see why.

...

He tries watercolors next. They are well suited for the jungle around him, outside this fortress, but instead he finally lets himself draw Brooklyn. It hurts, it _hurts_ —but it is almost a relief, that heaving breath let out after being held underwater.

It is cold in the room beside Bucky, but Steve will not wear a coat.

Brooklyn's colors are not like these colors—cold white and gray and fluorescent within, rich and dark without. Steve wonders if he will ever grasp Tony's hand in friendship again.

Steve wonders when it all went wrong.

 _The ice_ , he thinks. _When they brought me out of the ice._

Peggy is dead. In the end, they lived almost a hundred years and he knew her for so few of them. Steve paints Brooklyn, and wonders how she would have danced.

...

The sketches jumble together, but the paper in the library never runs out. Steve keeps the sketches under his mattress, though he has no real need to hide them. Sam is not angry with him. Clint might be, a little, but Clint is loyal and Natasha is proof that he can forgive. Natasha is—Natasha.

Wanda keeps to herself.

Steve wants to tell them he is sorry, but he does not know where to start.

He is not a perfect soldier, and he does not know if he is a good man.

He is not a trained monkey in a star-spangled suit, he is a man who thought he could be a lion, thought he could be a leader, until he realized that _out of time_ means _out of time_ on either side of a century.

Under the floorboards in an old apartment, there are sketches in Brooklyn. Under the mattress of a magnificent Wakandan Stronghold, there are sketches of Brooklyn.

...

Two weeks after they land in Wakanda, Steve started sketching again.

He thought it would make things better.

It doesn't.


End file.
